Censorship as Performance Art: Uzbekistan's Bizarre Wikipedia Ban

The country's decision to block the Uzbek-language wiki may be more about showmanship and nationalism than controlling information.

Wikipedia.org

Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia
is censorship as performance art. The ban, enacted late last month,
blocks all articles written in Uzbek while leaving articles in other
languages accessible. Unlike earlier acts
of online censorship, the ban on Uzbek Wikipedia articles does not
prevent citizens from accessing political information. On the contrary,
it blocks a prime venue of innocuous diversion: the thousands of
articles about pop stars, national heroes, and sports figures that
comprise the Uzbek-language Wikipedia. Uzbeks unable to access the Uzbek-language Wikipedia may now turn instead to the Russian-language Wikipedia,
a virtual treasure trove of Uzbekistan's state-suppressed memories that
could not possibly merit official approval. So why block the Uzbek
version? What does it accomplish?

Like its English-language counterpart, the Uzbek Wikipedia is an
idiosyncratic collection that represents the diverse interests of its
users. The best entries, as rated by moderators, are Cristiano Ronaldo, the Republic of Korea, Philosophy, and Alisher Navoi (a 15th century Uzbek poet). Other user favorites include Kelly Clarkson, Nirvana (the band), Internet Explorer, and a Finnish symphonic metal group called Nightwish. Pop culture entries tend to skew toward foreign tastes: the recently updated Uitni Hyuston entry, for example, is longer than that of popular Uzbek singer Yulduz Usmonova.
Though the Uzbek government can be capricious in its censorship, the
Uzbek Wikipedia is assiduously unprovocative - indeed, Uzbeks writing
about national hero Navoi is exactly the sort of thing that the state
encourages. Skimming the list of 7,890 entries, I found more of the same
apolitical fare: an epic piece on FIFA; a treatise on plov.

What is missing from the Uzbek Wikipedia? Information on contemporary political life. President Karimov
has a short, perfunctory entry, and all opposition figures and parties
are absent. The chronology of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a source of domestic tension for decades, terminates in 1991. The Uzbek entry for Andijon,
the site of the brutal state crackdown on civilian protest in 2005,
contains two lines detailing its geographic location and its founding as
a city in 1297. Contrast this with the entry on Andijon in the Russian Wikipedia
- not banned in Uzbekistan - a long, contentious account that notes
the deaths of innocent citizens and their subsequent labeling as
"criminals" by the Karimov regime.

I have a suspicion that what prompted the Wikipedia ban at the end of the January was the addition,
on January 24, of the following entries: "seks", "penis", "gey", and
"jinsiy aloqa" (sexual relations), which come complete with helpful
illustrations. This would be in keeping with the government's aversion
to overt sexual content, which they believe threatens national values.
(Note that this is simply a theory - I have no inside knowledge as to
the reason for the ban, nor has the Uzbek government addressed it. ) But
that still leaves the question of why the Russian or English Wikipedias
remain open to the public when they contain even more sexual imagery
and political content.

Here it is useful to look not only at what is being censored, but
where - because the question of "where" content exists online is more
complex for regimes that derive their power from narrow definitions of
nationalism. Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia has less to do with blocking
access to information than it does with territorializing an ambiguous
Uzbek ethnolinguistic virtual space. As I argued in a 2010 article, the Uzbek government views the Internet as a virtual extension of its sovereign dominion,
and sees Uzbek-language content as subject to its jurisdiction. Under
this logic, state intervention is more justified when Uzbeks write
encyclopedia entries in Uzbek than it is when Uzbeks read encyclopedia
entries in Russian, because those entries do not lie on the state's
ethnically demarcated virtual "territory". (That said, I see censorship
of the Russian version in Uzbekistan's future.)

Censorship in authoritarian states is not purely practical - it is an
act of showmanship, and in this case, one-upmanship over a foreign
threat. Large, foreign platforms challenge the Karimov regime not only
through the interaction they facilitate, but through their ambiguous
territorial standing. Last summer, Uzbekistan's state officials
responded to Facebook by creating Muloqot,
a state-run social media network which only Uzbeks in Uzbekistan can
use. By censoring the Uzbek-language Wikipedia, state authorities mark a
similarly ambiguous collaborative space as Uzbekistan state territory --
territory subject online, as it is on the ground, to strict government
control.

This post originally appeared at Registan.net and is reproduced with permission